Transformers: From The Time Before Knowing
by Eternalis
Summary: The Transformers discover a blind girl named Marie who has strange gifts, the Doctor shows up, and a secret that shaped everyone's pasts wreaks havoc on our dimension. I'm bad at summaries. This is my first serious fanfic, so tell me what you think.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter One is mostly background info. It gets more interesting in Chapter Two, I promise, but the Makers have to be described somehow. And seeing as how their origins haven't been explored yet in the movie universe, I'm going to do something similar to the old explanation and twist it around _a_ _lot!_ with my imagination, heavily infusing it with ideas I came up with for a master-race for an original fic I was writing ages ago. It's not like there aren't five or six continuities in existence, happily contradicting away. So don't kill me. Yet.

Chapter One

True immortals have no souls.

Even the term "immortal" is a paradox. How can an Immortal die? Yet they have before, and they will do so again. Their deaths, like their lives, wreak unspeakable havoc on their surroundings.

True Immortals have an unimaginable hate for all mortals, for they have no ability to create something original, and mortals do. They hate us because we are alive. They hate us because we can love and feel joy. They hate us because we can give birth, both figuratively and literally, to completely new creations.

And most of all, they hate us because we are doomed to die.

Immortals are trapped in this universe. Even if, by some miraculous combination of fortune, you manage to kill one, its malicious spirit will linger, a strain of taint on the world.

No one knows how they made themselves immortal. They came from a previous universe, using a transcendance field to carry their essences into what is now known to be a critical universe (a universe where space is nearly flat). The transcendance field is created by a device that can compact and alter the elemental composition of matter and even freeze time within itself, if it is immensely strong, requiring the contained energy of a massive black hole.

After a programmed period of time, the field expanded its inner temporary dimensions, and the denizens out of time were unleashed on the next universe, using the "skipping stone" spaceflight technology they had developed prior to their immortalization.

They fell into the young universe that would one day be home to our tiny, insignificant solar system. As they began to explore their new home, they came to realize that there was nothing more they could make. They could come up with no innovations. Their massive power, their abilities to harness and control incredible energies, their talent at manipulating DNA and other genetic codes, and their dazzling technological advancements were enough to make them godlike in our universe, yet they were stuck at a constant level, frozen in time. They turned to feeding off other intelligences, using drugs, torture, mind control, coercion and bribery to control the races they encountered. Some they enslaved, others became their allies in the worlds of mortals, but still others became their bitter enemies.

So it was that over time they developed a depth of hatred and malice for mortals that was so deep that its influence could be felt in the far reaches of the galaxies they visited. Everywhere they went they left poison, turmoil and chaos, reveling in others' suffering, hating their decadence, loving their madness, shamelessly courting their demise. For they knew that they could not truly die, and this made them reckless and bitter and drove them to insanity. Often the mortals they imprisoned were kept mercilessly alive. Sometimes, seemingly counterproductively, they made races stronger, giving them unbelievable advancements, lavishing new wonders upon them. Then suddenly, swinging in the opposite direction, they seeded poisons both literal and figurative into their pet races, reveling in the slow suffering of their demise.

Astonishingly, they seldom directly killed anything. They loathed openly taking other lives, because release from this world was the one thing they could never have. They forced entire races into battles so terrible that it would drive the participant peoples into extinction. They forced unspeakable madness on mortals, breaking and rebuilding their minds with meticulous care, repeatedly driving many nearly to madness and then pulling them back in a bizarre simulation of their own existence. Furiously, with insane energy, they sought to bend the universe to their image and to be its absolute rulers.

No one has ever accused them of being very logical beings.

So it was that they finally sought, in a moment of sanity, to truly build a people. It was arguably their single most redeeming and most damning work known to the race in question, for they created a force they could not conceive of-a bizarre blend of the inanimate and the living, the mortal and the immortal. They gave them some of their greatest secrets-some of their treasured knowledge of the mechanics of what lies beyond and between dimensions and their knowledge of and ability to create and manipulate transcendence fields being only a few of the greatest of these.

And they gave them life. Some might call it a mere imitation of such, but it was life nonetheless. It was sentience, and more than that, it was a strange synthesis of the essence of a living soul and the heart of the driving force behind dimensional structure itself.

Their prototype was one that would emulate their ways, one that would be a terrible mockery of themselves-but it was to be a mortal. But during its making, two of the Makers, what some might call siblings, left and journeyed across the galaxy alone. They were new additions to their people in this universe, their transcendence pods' systems having managed the space-skips only relatively recently.

And so it was that they came to orbit a lone star in one of the Milky Way's arms, which they named Máril'Dhaani, "Mortal Flame" in the verbal tongue of the first race they encountered, the Anorians. It was a young golden G-type sun with a long, stable life ahead of it and a comparatively quiet habitable zone.

These particular Makers were some of the few who had splintered from the main body of their race. They loved the life that was lost to them, but they paid little heed to those others who possessed it. They did not make races, for in their old time they were renowned for once building a world. They made things of stone and metal, gem and crystal, fire and water and air, but not of life in its various manifestations. Their works were made with painstaking detail and expert craftsmanship, so that their names are lost beneath the others that many races have since given them.

Their calculations were flawless, and as usual, none would find fault with their work. They sought out the star's habitable zone and began slowly to sift through what remained of the star's asteroid belt, using transcendence fields to manipulate the collected matter. Within those fields, pressures and temperatures this universe has not known since its violent birth transformed the material, creating elements this time has never seen, along with variations of some of the more common ones. And over a span of countless millennia, a world was born, formed out of ancient yet new things.

It wasn't long before one of their number discovered them and marveled at this newest work, as much art as efficiency. Together they stood at the feet of the newly-cooled crystal mountain ranges, looking up at the first sunrise the world had seen in its stable form. This would be the place for their semi-mortal race, but that race had to find it.

Upon seeing what their former companions were building, the first sibling turned to the second and said: "It is time we ended our forced isolation from the lands and minds of mortal and immortal alike."

The second nodded. "There must be balance. Surely someone remembers a time when we _owere_ Balance, not Discord, neither good nor evil, guardians of the Walls of Time, as terrible as the foundations of the universe."

The first nodded. "Then so it shall come to pass. We shall build a companion for this creature of the dark, and unlike us he shall be a creature of the light. There will be Balance, because it must be so; it can be no other way, nor will it ever be."

"But bear in mind that total light is as impossible as total dark," the second cautioned.

Bitterly the first laughed. "I know well the ways of the eternal battle, and how they always mix and become one and the same. Unknowingly, good and evil forever court their mutual dissolution."

They brought their proposition before the others of their race, confident that Balance would be upheld, even unknowingly, by these insane minds. And with a touch of their usual madness, they agreed that the two should build a creature of the light as a counterpart to Discord, savoring the thought of the struggle to come.

Little did they know to what they had agreed.

So the two set out to create the greatest living being known to science, forged of metals and composites and crystals known to few existing worlds-the wise, ageless visionary to balance the dark, chaotic warrior. The two were left far away, on the remains of a broken world that was hurled away from its dying sun, until their programmed time of awakening.

So the predecessors of the Transformers came to be.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two

September 27th, 2011. Tuesday dawned chill, rainy and utterly miserable in Anchorage, Alaska. Doggedly, I sloshed through the creek my road had become, trying to catch the bus before the clouds returned from their short hiatus and drenched me to the bone.

My cane clattered against something metallic. I cursed and tried to sweep it out of my way. Failing that, I tried to go around it. Discovering how large it was, I glanced around, bewildered and frustrated. It wouldn't do to piss off my professor by being late.

So intent was I on focusing on what little of the road I could see through the dense, swimming clouds trapped inside my corneas that I hadn't noticed the huge shadow that draped itself across my path. Finally, struggling hopelessly through the snow-globe white obscuring my sight, I peered up.

And up ... and up.

I couldn't see that far from my face. I could only see metal, solid and unyielding, unmoving and-as metal usually is-unresponsive to my expletives and uncaring of my plight.

Until, that is, I saw the shadow moving. I was too slow, and by diving out of the way I only succeeded in getting myself soaked and muddy before the fingers closed on me, as delicately as someone plucking a living butterfly from the air. I was raised an impossible distance, until I came face to face with a gleaming expanse of metal whose features I couldn't discern through the rain and the clouds in my eyes.

And then it spoke, in a measured, accentless voice so deep that it seemed to vibrate the very air in my chest, even though it actually wasn't very loud. "You are the Chronicler?"

_Shitfire,_ I thought. My heart sank, leaving me frightened and even colder than before.

"W-what do you m-mean?" Yeah, Marie-_ve-e-e-e-ery_ convincing. You totally rocked the "I'm innocent, I know nothing" attitude. Spectacular.

"Voiceprint identified." And then I heard my own voice, colored with my Logitech microphone's background hiss: "I thought I'd start writing again, and came up with this. Don't kill me. I'm just trying to come back ..."

"My silly books," I muttered, all the while berating myself for a complete idiot. "I write on the side." My, you're holding up admirably under pressure.

"You are the Chronicler," the massive voice said with certainty. It sounded like the earth speaking. Or maybe the sun, if either could do that. I couldn't quite decide.

_Fuck._ My German professor was the least of my worries. My mother was just barely higher on that list, along with how I was going to pay my rent. I was in deep shit.

I could console myself with the thought that death would be quick.

Because I knew what was happening.

I had resigned myself to my fate, my body growing as numb as my mind as the great creature took to the sky, melting a small section of the road as it did so. I tried to convince myself it was a bad dream, and failing that, I tried to not think at all. Great way to deal with your problems, Marie, just run away and hide in the back of your mind. You were always _so_ good at this. You and your assignments.

Then again, I'd never expected the whole Chronicler thing to come back and bite me in the ass. It was safely behind that Black-status interdimensional barrier that kept us safe from all other dimensions and variations thereof. As much as I hated that barrier, as much as I didn't understand its construction, as much as I sometimes feared it, it was _my_ safeguard against the universe. It was the shield behind which I could happily wreak havoc on the outside without suffering the consequences.

I was a stupid naive child if I thought it could last forever. Everyone out there knew about this annexed backwater dimension. I'd just counted on no one caring enough to try to get in.

Obviously, I was very mistaken.

I was expecting to come face to face with a certain dreaded, massive, shining figure and be vaporized on the spot. My idea of the worst case scenario was that he'd try to question me. Question me about what-my plans, my knowledge of relevant timelines? My blood ran even colder, if it was possible, at a new revelation: would he force me to direct things in his favor?

When we finally landed, we were in a small valley hemmed in by mountains. I could hear the echoes and judge that much as we came in for a landing. We hit solid ground and I was set down slowly, whereupon I promptly collapsed.

At least the ground was dry.

"What did you do to her, Ironhide?" someone asked.

"Retrieved her," the great figure replied.

What the hell?

"I knew we should have sent someone else."

"That is a moot point." A third voice joined the conversation. The second had been human. I could see his shadow approaching. The third was not. Its shadow fell across the others, obscuring everything.

"C'mon, Optimus, dude. Look at her." The human shadow bent slightly, the voice sounding closer to my face. "Marie? I'm right, you're Marie?"

I found my voice and felt terribly like those silly girls in movies that I always get pissed at. "I'm not going to die?"

The human, a boy maybe my age or a year older, laughed. "No, not right now, hopefully not until you're supposed to."

"Small miracles," I muttered.

"We have you transferred." Another normal human walked up, taller and older than the first. "You don't go to UAA now. You go to Portland State, with Lorelei and Sam and Mikaela."

"Lorelei knew you?" I asked.

"Well," Sam said, "not really. Kind of. She doesn't have as much to do with this, and we want to keep it that way."

Lorelei would have a fit, I thought. She wouldn't survive three seconds of some of the situations Sam and Mikaela have managed.

Then again, I might not, either.

"Why am I here?" I asked.

"Because you are the Chronicler," the third voice said. I looked up and could only see gleaming blue and shimmering crimson through the heavy mist before my eyes.

"I should have known," I said. "Optimus Prime."

"Is the Barrier still intact?" Sam asked. "We got through by accident. We need to make sure Decepticons don't show up here, too."

"I don't know," I said.

"Could you have located the wrong person, Optimus?" Ironhide asked.

"No," he said. "This is the Chronicler. Her signature is unique."

The Barrier was put up six thousand years ago, annexing this dimension for unknown reasons. It not only closed off this dimension from other universes, but it closed it off from all its parallels as well. No one knows who or what built it, or how they did it. Changing dimensional structure was impossible.

Or it was supposed to be, anyway.

"Can you prove it is her?" Ironhide asked.

"Maybe he can't," I said, "but I can." Chronicler to the core, I was going to follow the code ingrained deeply into my mind, perhaps to my death.

"Continue," Optimus said.

So I explained.

Six years ago, when I turned twelve, I found a neat stack of paper on my desk that I didn't remember writing. And on it I found a strange, incomplete story, one the likes of which I'd never read before. It chronicled the journeys of a girl named Iyana through many different stories and settings, some of which I was familiar with, some of which I was not.

And somehow, the stack continued to grow. One day I looked up and discovered that my mother had been standing at the door, attempting to get my attention for half an hour.

"You've been writing away for thirty minutes, ignoring me!" she said.

I looked down at the paper in front of me, and read a few unfinished lines. I reached to the side, felt the familiar stack of paper, and judged its thickness. It was the story, and I had written more of it.

For a while I was convinced that I was insane, as further proof of what was happening was presented to me. But the fact that the writing went through many universes and wove them together in complex, logical interactions-even if I didn't find the stories logical from what limited perspective I had-made it seem like it couldn't be a work of madness.

I started to experiment. I sat with friends of mine and found obscure instrumentals, and quietly, as I listened, I infused the music with very specific ideas, listening to the chords and imagining various scenes in vivid detail, all the while not saying a word. The people in question then proceeded to describe, in exact detail, what I had pictured. Sometimes I made the images something entirely different from the mood of the music, and still it was the same.

And then I started with further experiments. Some of them I couldn't verify, and I was forced to proceed on intuition. At one point that summer, I was stuck, unable to continue, not sure what to do about the writing. One day I was sitting on the couch in my dad's living room, listless and empty-feeling. Lately I had grown strange and lethargic, yet I couldn't eat and couldn't fall asleep. When I could, my sleep was plagued with strange, unsettling dreams, fragments of terrible events within the story that I could not put into words. I could remember them, but describing them eluded me. And they were terrible, things my twelve-year-old mind had never experienced or imagined.

But the most frightening part of it was that though I went through the physical reactions of fear, my mind was numb, my emotions felt like someone else's. And the story stubbornly eluded me.

My sister came rushing into the house and pulled on my arm. I looked up blankly, my brain slow to comprehend her, my reactions slow and clumsy. The air felt heavy that day, and it had been hard for me to breathe all morning. I couldn't get up and move much; I quickly became dizzy and breathless. I couldn't eat a thing. I had a glass of water beside me that I was slowly trying to finish, but otherwise, I thought I couldn't hold anything down.

Julia's lips moved, but it seemed take forever the sound to reach me. "The garage ... come look ..."

I rose as if pulled by strings, too detached to feel pain. I was sick, I was tired, but I didn't have the energy to refuse her. So she pulled me, blinking and dazed, into the light of the sun.

We lived in a trailer, the only permanent structure being the garage beside it. We went into the tired little building, and I stopped.

I could feel it here more than ever. The air was so heavy that I staggered. Julia caught me and I struggled to catch my breath. My body felt like it was made of lead, and my ribs were crushing my lungs, and my skin was tingling, crawling with-

Something.

Julia sat me down against a pile of boxes and went into the back of the room. My cousin came to stand in front of me-Emily, having yet to grow into her figure, a figure of long narrow angles. "Should I move you?" she asked, confused.

I nodded mutely.

Emily put her hands under my arms and hoisted me to my feet. I couldn't feel the ground under my bare soles, and I swayed, dizzy and heavy and slow.

"Wait," said Julia. She was holding something sharp, a dull gleam of metal, and she lifted it and placed a worn knife, hilt first, into my hand.

It was like touching electricity. My blood burned, pulsing that icy shock through my body, and I pushed away from my cousin, tripped on something, and fell flat on my face.

The garage had two sections, with a room behind the right-hand one. I had fallen into the back room, the light I didn't realize Julia had given me clattering to the floor. Something red was caught in its beam, but I couldn't tell what. As I tried to focus, I felt a moment of terrible dizziness and nausea, and-

I was standing up, feeling just fine. I wasn't better than normal, I was simply normal. Someone had come into the garage; I heard the second door swing shut. He-for it was a he-walked slowly around the corner and stopped, surveying the room quietly.

"Silence is here," he said. My cousin and sister acted like nothing was there.

"What the hell are you doing here?" I asked. "And who are you, anyway?"

He inclined his head at me. I could see that much in the dimness, but not his expression. I got the sense that he was smiling. "A little birdie, if you will," he said, his voice light. "I'm going to do what I can for you. I'm not magic, nor is what you experience. Magic implies something unexplainable ... There's a key in human genetics, placed into your ancestors' DNA millions of years ago. Scientists think that you have a lot of useless DNA riding your cells, and for the most part, they're right ... But you were born without it. It's linked to your blindness, but they are usually independent of one another. The key is indirectly related to many ... recessive genes."

"What are you saying?" I asked.

"Your human scientists have many theories, that there are vast portions of your own mind that are not in use. In some ways, they are right. You certainly don't use them all at the same time, and that was the excuse they started making for how much wasn't in use, and that a lot of it was backup space, if you will ... But that genetic key leads to the needed synchronization, and it seals your fate. It's often happened halfway, but it has very rarely been opened completely ..."

"Wait," I said. "I have a sinking feeling about this ..."

"There was a living man whose genetic key was unlocked completely."

"And ..."

"I just thought I should warn you," he said. "This man wasn't a Chronicler like you"-at that time I wasn't familiar with the term-"but he was a man of unprecedented mental ability. He was born in the early 1940's, and in 1963 ... his key tried to kill him."

"Who do you mean?" I asked.

"You'll find him eventually. He probably won't notice you. But you'll have a few more parts of your answer."

"He's still alive?"

"Oh yes," said the man, and there was something in his voice I couldn't name, akin to sorrow. "He is alive now. You see, there's a mental limit to what the human body can handle. Give the mind too much power, too much potential ... and it will warp the body, sometimes at a purely genetic level, sometimes ... with massive effects."

He stepped back. "I'm going to go now. Watch out for Silence. He's looking for back-dimension Chroniclers and potential perceptives. He intends to kill you. Oh and, Marie? Good luck." He leaned forward, holding out his hand to me. In it was a small, simple, faceted white stone. It was light but amazingly solid. It felt like it would be nearly impossible to smash. "Just a token," he said, and placed it into my hand, and turned away.

He stepped around the partition. A second later, I heard the door swing shut.

I don't know what happened then. It wasn't like waking up, it was like losing a small piece of time, so that with a seamless transition, I went from standing there listening to the echoes of the door closing to lying on my back on the floor, gasping and trembling with an inner sensation of something similar to cold, so immense and complete that it was almost something you could fall into. The air itself was a heavy thing pressed against my body. Even my eyelids felt heavy, not drawn down by sleep but pressed down by gravity. My dad was bending over me. I sat bolt upright, was overcome with dizziness, and collapsed backwards. For a moment the ground tilted crazily and panic gripped me. Convinced that I was going to fall off the ground and into the sky, I reached up, holding on to the closest thing I could find, and shut my eyes. For an instant I was suspended, engulfed with cold in the hot summer day, and then the world righted itself and I came crashing to my senses.

My dad was saying something. It took a moment for me to gather focus, to listen to his voice, to understand his words. It was a process I did in careful steps. Focus-slowly, listen, identify sound, interpret sound, focus-slowly, understand response, formulate response, and respond. You don't usually have to consciously perform that process.

"... all right? Julia told me you fell."

"I ..." I stammered for a moment, frustrated by the lack of connection between brain and mouth "... I'm fine," I said, "will be. Sleepy ..."

"It must have been the heat," Emily said. It was an unusually hot, dry summer. It hadn't rained since March.

Dad half-carried me into the house, put me in my nice cool bed, and let me go to sleep.

The rest of my Chronicling was history.

"Do you know who he was?" Ironhide asked.

"No," I said.

"I have theories," Optimus said. "I know who your mystery reference was."

"So do I," I said. "And he's still alive, by some miracle of fate."

"But the identity of your visitor-and the manner of his appearance-is puzzling."

"Later we found a blood circle in the shed behind the garage, someone's dabbling in black magic," I said. "I really don't think the black magic has anything to do with this. It was a coverup for what was under the floorboards. We'll never know for sure what was there. The hole was too deep, and we didn't want to get anyone involved. Unless you want to go back and look."

"We probably should," said Sam.

"Unless someone's destroyed all the stuff on that property," I said. "It could happen."

"I think they have not," Optimus said.

The tall man interjected, "You could clear it with us before you go gallivanting off to Alaska in search of an interdimensional traveler that may or may not exist."

"Agent Banachek," Optimus stated solemnly, "I know who Silence is. Believe me when I say that this has become a matter of utmost seriousness."

"Like Decepticon serious?" Sam asked.

"In a manner of speaking," Optimus said.

"What-or who-is Silence?" Banachek asked.

"Silence is a figure who has been involved in our past," Optimus said. "His origins are unknown, and he is a semi-organic entity capable of separating his mental and physical being, by careful use of transcendence fields and casting it throughout space to any place he desires. Some believe that he can also move throughout time, by causing his consciousness to leave the bow of the universe since he is Essence-bound and by returning at any point he chooses to, but I find this extremely implausible, even for a Discordance."

"Discordance?"

"It is the English name given the race that he theoretically belongs to," Optimus said, "but no one is certain whether there are any more of his kind. For all of our sakes, I hope there are not."

"How do you propose to deal with him?"

"He teleports using a phenomenon which is facilitated by Energon's ability to instantaneously interact with any Essence residue anywhere else in the universe. This has much to do with how it underlies the structure of space-time, but I will not bore you with the details. There was an Autobot who could block this transfer, throwing off the connection between the separate Energon stores."

"Was? He's gone?"

"He vanished many millennia ago. It was believed that he still lived, but no one was certain, and no one knew where to look. And, I do think I have that proof for you."

Optimus reached up and did something out of my limited sight. Either way, there was a sound like sliding metal panels and then he was bending down toward me, holding out his hand. I had a moment to wonder what was happening and to register that ten tons of metal were hanging just feet above me, and then-

Something fell into my lap-a large smooth orb, maybe a foot across. Its overall color was a deep, shimmering blue, flecked with points of white and palest gold. In my hands it was warm, not overly so but not cool like stone. I could feel a faint stirring within it, and I laid my ear against it.

I knew what it was. For a moment my hands closed around it and I just held it, like something unimaginably precious.

She was my lifeline.


	3. Chapter 3

It took me forever and a day to finish this chapter ... I have to pace character development properly, at which I am most likely an epic fail, but that's beside the point. And I probably should have clarified that the Transformers universe is being mashed into one I started building, along with with Doctor Who and maybe a few others, so this might technically become even more of a crossover fic. We'll all just have to wait and see, including me.

Chapter Three

I let tears slide out of the corners of my eyes, unable to stop them. All these years, stuck here desperately alone, surrounded by people but always alone, and now I was holding a remnant of my past, a part of my present, an undeniable piece of my future. If only to give in, let go, accept something I'd always known was there, I would accept my future.

"TAVI," I murmured. "Come out ..."

I felt the answering tremble and I quickly set the stone aside and stood up. There was a flurry of color and some kind of motion that went in directions I didn't think existed. And then TAVI was there, serene and still as ever.

It really didn't look like much. It was a long, narrow rectangle of unassuming white hovering a foot off the ground. If you bent closer, you could see an elegant script written in a recognizable angular, proud hand scrolled across its surface. It was Ilian's hand, the hand of the man who had created her. I couldn't focus well enough to read it, but it was written on a large scale so I knew it was there.

"TAVI will be our way past the Barrier," Optimus said. "Fueled by star power, TAVI will link to her alternate on the other side and use him to guide her through."

"TAVI is an Autobot?" Banachek asked.

"No," I said, "but she might be similar. Am I right, Optimus?"

"In some ways, TAVI is actually more advanced."

TAVI was created in response to the Barrier, but after the death of her creator, she had never been put to her intended use. She and her counterpart were meant to be guides across it.

"I thought all we had to worry about was Decepticons," Sam said.

"All we had to worry about?" I asked incredulously. "Hell!"

"Speaking of Decepticons," something said, "your rendezvous point has been compromised."

I had to say "something," because the voice was incredible. It was the sound of the ground moving, the sound of a mountain speaking. But it didn't growl with that horrible effect that pitch-changing programs have on voices. It was simply so deep that the sound itself was part of the surroundings.

Something slid into my field of vision, and suddenly there was no light. Everything around me was engulfed in twilight. Whatever stood in front of us seemed to suck the light out of the surroundings, it was simply that black. Even I could see the bright glitter of elegant gold script and the ghostly shimmer of silver decorations running along its outline. I had a second to realize that Cybertronian script was probably computer code, literally, and then to think that I wouldn't have decorated something with a programming language, and then to think that we didn't have programming languages that had their own alphabet and script separate from any other, and then it spoke again. "Incoming," it said, "six hostile warships, identified Decepticons."

Optimus whirled. "This place is not easily defensible," he said. "Take the humans, and TAVI, and go."

A voice came from behind me. "Get in, then."

I spun around and was faced with a tall white box with elegant gold scrollwork around its edges. Its elaborately decorated door was open, and was tall enough even to admit Optimus.

"TAVI, your circuits aren't fully recalibrated ..." Optimus began.

"Get the hell in here," TAVI said, and arrowed straight forward. Suddenly the doorsill came up behind me and I was swept up on to the platform within. I scrambled backward, because now TAVI was approaching Optimus at an even higher speed.

"_In!"_ she commanded.

She swept up against him, and he was forced to step inside. Transformers scrambled in behind him, and Sam, Agent Banachek, and a girl I assumed must be Mikaela tumbled over the ledge around their feet.

"TAVI," Optimus said, his voice echoing strangely, "what do you think you are doing?"

"Getting the hell out of here. Sit down or you'll fall."

"Wait!" I said. "Where are we?"

"In TAVI," Optimus said, voice echoing his amusement back at him.

I whirled around and nearly fell over the railing. I grabbed it with reflexes faster than I realized, and whistled two clear notes to judge the size of the room.

I glanced back at Sam. "How big is it in here?"

He came up beside me and swept an arm out at all that space. "We're about a hundred feet in the air, maybe. And the room is huge-you could fit my parents' house in here, maybe."

"In fact, you could," Optimus said, "with room to spare."

"I wish I could see this place," I said, and sighed.

"TAVI!" Optimus said. "You can't fly in this condition."

"I don't really care for dying," she said, "and I'm less prepared to put up a fight than I am to fly, believe me."

"What about the Static?" Optimus asked. Something about that word made something cold slide down my spine, and I shivered. _ The_ _Static_ ...

"I'm the only one who can reliably track such a chaotic little entity," TAVI said. Was that a hint of smugness I heard in her voice?

"But that is not the point!"

"Sit down or you'll all take a beating," she said.

The massive black figure I'd seen earlier stepped around everyone with a kind of eerie grace and descended the stairs, or rather floated down them. They all rose silently and hung suspended for a moment, before drifting silently to the floor. Great one reached for us, lowered us to the floor, and landed as softly as a feather. It was eerie as hell, and strangely beautiful, seeing them move in crystalline silence.

The floor cracked beside me, and a chair rose out of it. "Sit," TAVI said. "I'd rather not have you plastered against the floor. I could clean you up, but you'd be a great loss."

So, at a loss for words, I sat down. The chair folded itself around me, rising to finally seal over my head. Little vents opened up at about face level, and fresh air poured into the tiny space.

I knew this routine, but I hadn't experienced it since my sixth span, and I certainly wasn't prepared for what happened next. The chair I was in was soundproofed to the point that it was like soundproofing outside, if that were possible. There were literally no echoes, and my voice sounded like I was speaking into an emptiness so complete that there was nothing in the incalculable distance of a universe for it to bounce off of.

Suddenly there was something that would have been sound, but it was too low. A deep rumbling traveled up from the soles of my feet to the top of my head, yet I still couldn't hear a thing, only my own oddly echoless voice and my heartbeat, painfully odd in that unnatural silence. It grew until I felt my bones shake, but I could still hear no sound.

And then there was a great movement, in directions which I can't describe. It was upside down and backward, forward and sideways, upward into a dimensionless darkness that I didn't, couldn't, ever know.

And then it was over, in the space of a few seconds, and the chair quietly unfolded from around me. I glanced down, felt my hands and arms, refrained from checking to see if I had all my toes, and finally glanced around.

At least , think everyone was still there. There was a variety of shapes and sizes and colors to look at, even through my eyes.

"Everyone's here?" That was Banachek's voice, off to my right.

"No one is unaccounted for," Optimus said, somewhere off to my left.

"Is everyone in one piece?" Sam asked.

"Gods," a soft voice murmured.

"I think so," Mikaela said uncertainly.

"TAVI," Optimus said, deceptively calmly, where ... are we?"

"My God ..." Another astonished voice, Banachek again.

I twisted free of the chair. "What are you all looking at?"

Someone made a peculiar musical tone, which happened to be the kind of sound I can pinpoint exactly, so I whirled and walked toward it. They were standing at a strange octagonal console, which looked like it had been chipped from a block of pure obsidian. Thousands of tiny dials, levers, buttons, touch screens, and more things like crosses between the former which I couldn't quite describe decorated its surface, with small monitors scattered between them like winking stars. Set in the center of it was a tall glass column filled with floating crystals, which were held up by visible strands of pale, silvery-gold energy. Mounted on one face of the console, about the controls, was a massive screen which I knew showed the outside in realtime. But I had no idea what was on it.

"It's so ... so empty out there."

"TAVI, you know you cannot travel forward," Optimus said.

"I didn't," she said softly. "I ... didn't."

"Your hometown," Sam said, turning to face me. "Marie, it's ... it's gone."

"What?"

"It's radioactive," TAVI said. "Scans show the cause was nuclear ..."

"Shit," Mikaela said. "God, Marie, I'm so sorry ..."

"Why?" The word was torn out of me; it literally hurt to say it. "Why ... all this life ... because of me ... why not just me! They only had their problem with me! But this, this is ..." Words fell flat. Anchorage, Alaska had been decimated. I was homeless, hopeless, and helpless to do anything about it. Something twisted and broke inside me, some crucial part of the soul, and my body was suffused with near physical cold.

I drew on everything I had at my command, and focused. I channeled that focus until power pounded in my veins, as if I could replace my blood with soul-giving, life-burning energy. I took a single deep breath and gathered that feeling in around me, that impressive, indescribable sensation that made my head spin and my blood boil cold-hot-neither, and I breathed it into the air. I felt like I should see it, like I should breathe out a stream of eye-searing light, but I could see nothing. All around me, the Autobots had stepped back to form a silent circle. In my mind I called to my Council, whether they heard me or not. In my mind I said, By all the power vested in me as Chronicler of the First Order, by all the power innate in me as the daughter of Vares the Eternal, by all the power gifted to me by the Eternali of Anorai, let me move Time with my voice. In a voice that sounded like some cold, ruthless stranger's I said, "Let every animate entity who is responsible for this be wiped clean off the face of Time ... at any cost."

"_No!"_ Optimus' voice rang in my ears, electronically magnified. He had influence in the stars, maybe enough even to counter mine, but he couldn't speak across the dimensional arc like I could ... yet. "Reverse it while you can. The Eternali have heard you."

"I can't," I said. With the force of my sending drained from me, I was dizzy and light-headed. "I'm such an excuse for a Chronicler."

Chroniclers didn't have the power to truly change time. But they were the directors of a group of beings said to have put themselves in stasis and plunged into a nearby critical universe, commonly called no-space, to survive the death of their dimension of origin. I know, it's scary as hell. It took me seven years to accept that that world existed, then another four for me to accept that I was part of it. I still couldn't accept that I could direct such power. It frightened me like nothing has ever frightened me before. Things I couldn't control could frighten me, but things I could control could frighten me worse, especially when I realized how powerful that was.

And with the barrier coming down, what I had said was not an idle threat. The Decepticons had probably hoped to keep their little entrance a closely-guarded secret, and use this world as a base from which no eternalis could attack them. But eternali saw way more than people gave them credit for, and since people gave them credit for a lot, that was really saying something.

"TAVI, give me local Alaskan radio channels," I said. "Are any online?"

"No," she said. "There's dead air from Barrow to Canada."

"_Shit!"_ I slammed a hand down on her console.

"What about the NEST base up here?" Agent Banachek asked. "It's a backup facility, but it's staffed nonetheless. The location was definitely desirable."

"And what about the Decepticon base that's sure to be up here?" Sam asked.

"What about the three hundred thousand dead?" I asked bitterly. "Has anywhere else been nuked?"

"Juneau and Fairbanks are intact," TAVI said. "Sit tight. We're going to Oregon." And the chair that rose behind me practically dragged me into it.

I had a moment in that unknowing silence to scream, silently, within my mind. Not even my odd echoless confines could hear me. I flung rage and defiance and hatred outward, things that seared my blood as they left my body, and struggled to find some kind of center clarity. Grief opened below me, a choking refusal of what was happening, a horrible realization that I was helpless, useless ... "To no longer be of practical use is to fail utterly," I had once said, I was feeling that now.

I was moving into an unknown world. I had Chronicled for years, but it was not possible to see everything. No entity in any universe can encompass Time. I was losing ground, my past was apparently more than even I had believed, and everyone seemed to know it but me.

What could I possibly do? ...

But there could be no answer.


	4. Chapter 4

So I decided to invent something... tell me what you think of this idea. I have no idea if it's come up before-there are too many continuities to keep up with. Heh.

Chapter Four

"Wouldn't someone see TAVI land?"

I was trailing Sam and Mikaela into the dorms. I was apparently sharing a room with her, across from Sam's. Since the Decepticons knew where Sam had been, he'd had to switch colleges and end up with a brand-new, NEST-MADE identity.

"Probably not," Mikaela said.

TAVI was masquerading as a pale grey Lincoln Navigator-lifted, I knew, from the image of a friend's mother's car. Her "windows" were screens, showing an image of the car's interior filled with our stuff, conveniently angled so that it looked convincing when we leaned in to pick up bags. It also had the ability to refresh in realtime, so it looked flawless. Until you squinted. Which, hopefully, no one was doing.

"We landed far enough off any main thoroughfares," Sam said. "I'm pretty sure it's fine. No one would expect me to have gone from Princeton to Portland, it's just too random."

"Random," I muttered, "the word that describes my life."

"This way," Sam said, veering in the direction of a typically disorganized mass of college-age kids headed toward one of several dorm buildings.

"No one saw TAVI land because everyone's preoccupied with Alaska," Sam said.

"Sam, don't be tactless," Mikaela snapped.

"Look, no, it's not tactless," I said. "It's honest." I was preoccupied with Alaska. But I was biased. "People think it's North Korea, but they know about Decepticons now. They should know better."

"Not everyone knows about or believes in Decepticons," Mikaela said.

"And that's just what the Decepticons want. Hit the Air Force base in Anchorage, make sure America blames North Korea, nukes fly ... er, you get the picture ..."

I shivered. "I could have lived without it."

"And since it would be humans doing all the fighting, what the Autobots could do to try to get them to see reason would be extremely limited," Sam said. "Decepticons start World War III, Optimus can't do shit."

I really hated the way this was going. "They're counting a lot on humanity's natural mistrust and love of fighting," I said. "Maybe somehow ..." But I knew even as I started to say it that the odds were ridiculous. Humans were notoriously unreasonable creatures.

"Is it wise?" Mikaela asked us as we approached the entrance. "Talking in the middle of all this?" She gestured.

I would never go back home. I would never see my parents again, or my siblings and my cousins and my grandparents. Lorelei's family was gone, every random face I had ever seen in that town was gone. Half the population of a state was gone, in the blink of an eye. It was unthinkable, unacceptable-it could not go without punishment. At any cost, I had said. What would I give away-most of which I didn't have the right to give away-before that was accomplished? How much would it take from the world? How was I to know? What kind of useless Chronicler was I, if I couldn't stop such a silly, wasteful blunder? And if I was the best that could be sent back here, what did that say about my Order?

What if there were no others left? What if I was spared by some twist of fortune?

"Marie." Someone's hand was on my shoulder, and my first instinct was to jerk back. What would happen to the next person that touched me? Could I stand the answer?

"Marie, keep moving," Mikaela said gently. "You can't just stand on the steps. We almost have all the stuff in."

I ordered my feet to follow her, commanding my mind to track the distinctive sound and scent pattern that each person exhibited. Everyone smelled and sounded distinctly different from one another, so much so that you couldn't mask your particular signature. I've always had heightened senses, but I only realized they were different a few years ago. I had written it off to my blindness.

How many things that I had always taken for granted would show themselves to be signs of something greater, something potentially impossible to accept? What would it take to find what someone wise had once called "a place of looking through?" In the terminology of a very ancient race, a place of looking through was a point in time of understanding, a shatterpoint of present and future timelines that one could shed clarity upon. Was that now? Or had that already come and gone, and I had simply been too idiotic to see it? Knots of foreboding twisted in my stomach, each one symbolizing something I couldn't allow myself to ignore.

Damn being a Chronicler, and damn all those who revered the position. It wasn't fair of me to think it, but no one had to know what I was thinking. And what was your mind, if not your last sanctuary, where you could have every thought you could never say?

"Last load of stuff," Mikaela said, setting her boxes down beside her bed. She turned to look at me. "Marie? What's wrong?"

"Nothing," I said, such a practiced, easy response. I'd even gotten the timing and tone right. But somehow, I wasn't fooling her.

"It was horrible, what happened in Alaska. Half the state is literally gone, I mean ..." Her voice trailed off. Everyone knew what came next-fallout, cancer, mutation ...

"But that's not just it, is it?" she asked.

"That's a lot to take in," I said.

"You're the Chronicler," she said.

I winced. "Damned shit example of one," I muttered, and bent over a box.

"Don't do that. Do you think you should have seen this coming?" she asked.

My head snapped up. "What do you think? Hmmm, Decepticons find Chronicler, Decepticons attack in the one manner assured to cause maximum short- and long-term damage. You'd think it would be an obvious logical progression."

Mikaela reached down, by the sound of it to plug something into the wall. "That's not always the way it-oh _shit!"_

"Defective socket?" It was Sam standing in the doorway. He whirled to get someone's attention.

I could smell smoke already. Whatever she had plugged in was fried. Without thinking, I leapt across the room, saw the cord, and clamped down on it with both hands. There was a shocking sensation, like a thousand pins and needles running against my hands.

Mikaela reached for me, but Sam was in the room already, and he pulled her back. "If you touch her-was

Then the lights flickered and went out completely. From the exclamations across the building, the entire dorm was out. There was an odd sound, that kind of eerie crackle that broken light bulbs make, and then the lights were back on and everything was humming to life.

Calmly, I pulled the cord out of the wall and held it up. "This is kinda screwed," I said, running my hands back along its singed surface to its other end. "Good thing you didn't have anything plugged into it." I reached down and passed a hand in front the wall socket. "I hope it's usable now. I'm not entirely-was

"Marie! What the hell?" Mikaela asked.

And then I realized what I had done.

I dropped the cord and spun around. Mikaela reached out tentatively, and I offered her my hands.

"No burns," she said. I felt my palms, and sure enough, they were smooth and cool to the touch.

"What. The hell," I said, stunned.

A tiny Autobot-Firefly-leapt up on to my shoulder. Optimus had told me, "Firefly adopts someone every few centuries. It is interesting that it should be you." She was babbling something: "Static, Static, she is Static!"

"What the hell is a Static?" Sam asked her.

Firefly, an eight-inch semi-humanoid figure with way too many arms and a magnificent double set of wings, flicked two sets of arms and her upper wings at him. "You know not Static? Backward you creatures can be." She buzzed into the air, a blur of tiny limbs creating a breeze that stirred my hair. "Static," she said as if she was speaking to a child, "is organic gifted by Essence with essential control. Know you not of Static, Sam? Know you should of Static, you who knows the mind of that which was before knowing. Only happened six times in history, six times in over ten million years. But Allspark is gone, there be no Static."

"The Matrix is back," Sam said. "Maybe that has something to do with it."

"Why it not make you Static, then, you who saw through time?" Firefly asked, buzzing around in front of his face. "Strange is way of ancient things."

"You can say that again," Mikaela said.

"I'm a Chronicler," I said. "Not a Static."

"Be not utterly ridiculous," Firefly said. "Static is Static til Static body ends. Nothing change that, ever."

"How old are you, Firefly?" Sam asked.

"Old enough that I see all six Static," she said. "I know them all. Most good, but one be very, very bad."

"Wait, are you older than Optimus?" I asked.

"Maybe. Very likely," she said. She dropped on to the table and transformed in a blur of folding limbs, becoming a sleek little iPhone. An earphone extracted itself out of the proper port and gestured at me.

"I wish she wouldn't do that," Mikaela said.

I picked Firefly up, slid her into my pocket, and put her earphone in, whereupon she instantly resumed her endless chatter.

"Firefly! Calm down!" I said. "I can't think in the middle of all that noise! God, for ten million years, you're still a little kid at heart. Er, Spark. Oh, what the hell." Sam snickered.

"Don't you think we should tell Optimus about this?" Mikaela asked.

"What you think he do?" Firefly said through her speaker, which sounded odd coming from my pocket. "Swoop down like"-she made a noise that I can only guess was a word in another language-"and fix everything?"

"I dunno, maybe!" I retorted, thoroughly sick of everyone either treating me with ridiculous deference or like some sort of poisonous spider. "He's _Optimus_ _Prime,_ after all!" If they expected Optimus to come neutralize this weird shit in an instant, they probably had another think coming. By now he was on the other side of the world with TAVI, perpetrating even more weird shit, so we would just have to live with it. More accurately, _I_ would have to live with it, unless someone had a reliable personality transplant technique working and someone else wanted to try it out for a day. Because if that was the case, they were welcome to it.

Naturally, I kept my mouth shut.

"OK, good point," Sam said. "Someone send him a message anyway, he'll hear it when he can. Otherwise, we have to pretend to be completely normal kids."

"Yeah, if I don't go around putting out electrical fires," I muttered, and then had to laugh at the image that brought to mind.

"It's a good thing I have an extra one of these," Mikaela said, flicking the ruined phone charger into the trash can.

"Throw sand on it for good measure," I said.

"Sand? Where do you see sand?"

"Wait, my teleporter's broken," I said. "And don't use the black stuff that's covering half of Alaska. I'm not sure I can cure radiation sickness."

"I don't want to be immortal," Mikaela said.

"Ask Optimus about that," Sam muttered.

"I'm older than he is!" Firefly chimed in.

"Close enough," I retorted. "Besides, you sleep through most of the interesting stuff."

"Do not!"

"Yeah, she was awake for the Static," Sam said.

"I don't know about you," Mikaela said, "but I have like, fifty million boxes of stuff ..."

"I do too," I said, "but mine are mostly electronics."

"Out," Mikaela said, "while girls unpack."

"Don't catch anything on fire," Sam said as he beat a hasty retreat.

"Then don't make me," I replied, but the door was already closing behind him.

What? Static? My muses are strange ...

Firefly? Where the hell did that come from?

I do random things at god thirty in the morning.

And Marie needs to get over her spaz-ness, and since I just used that as a word, I need sleep. No more writing tonight.


End file.
